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Nalates Urriah

Second Life: Content Creator’s UG Meeting

I’ve compressed parts of the video without voice to reduce the run time.

Short Synopsis

These are the tops discussed during the meeting. They are in the order they appear in the video. Because I was time compressing the video, I didn’t collect the time marks.

Lindens will be looking at a looping animation issue.

Lindens are currently working on ACI cost.

Planning to update the Bento Wiki Page.

Server side baking for mesh… Some would like Classic Server Side Baking (SSB) to be extended to the new mesh bodies, I think that is what they mean. I don’t see how that can work. In the classic avatar skin, tats, underwear, and clothes are backed into a single texture. There are no materials to deal with.

The advantage to this is the 3 skin textures, 3 or more possible texture tattoos, 2+ underwear, 2+ clothes textures can combine 13 or more possibly 1024×1024 textures into 3 – 512×512 textures. An obvious savings in the data needing to be sent to everyone seeing the avatar.

But, how does one figure out how to bake Slink, Maitreya, and other mesh bodies with different skin, tattoo, underwear, and clothing UV Maps? I think it would be horribly complex.

However, there is discussion and thought about changing the server side bake from 512 to 1024 textures… Lindens that have on list, no current work is being done. But, I wonder if the change is worth the effort?

In the circles I run in, most people are wearing mesh bodies. I can’t even guess at the numbers of classic vs mesh body users.

There is a challenge animating hand held things… a gun, num-chuks, etc. The problem is in knowing where hand is, as there is no child-of-the-hand to attach to… You can attach an item to the hand and animate the item. But, the ‘rigged’ hand may move and that does not move the hand attachment point.

To even know what needs to be added to allow scripting animations of parts of the avatar bone chain, Vir needs questions answered about what would be needed – Imagine something like ‘Puppeteer’.

Currently Vir has been working on asset-fetching via HTTP/CDN – He has a working viewer and a sim update. Both in the QA cue. The development work is done. Now it is up to QA and operations, unless they find a problem. I would expect to see an RC of the viewer in April. There is a beta/project version of the viewer that I mention in another article. I’m not sure those links still work… so no link here.

The Lindens still need more data on rendering costs. (Follow on to previous ACI cost work.) When you see server updates that have mention of logging, that is part of what is being logged. The Lindens need more data on materials, specular, normal.

Bug-41491 – Please honor the request to cap attachment’s render weight to 10 million instead of the current 1 million.